A feast in stone reveals Spain’s culinary past

There are pigs’ trotters, aubergines, clams and oysters. Peaches, radishes, a skinned hare flanked by a knife, a squirrel on a bed of hazelnuts and a plate of lemons across which a small snake slithers. There is a dish of peppers from Mexico, which had fallen to Hernán Cortés just over a decade before the masons who carved this incredible feast in Seville cathedral set to work.

Surrounding the arch that leads to the sacristy in the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, these 68 intricately carved plates of food reveal the social upheaval rippling through Spain 500 years ago. The plates, obscured when the huge doors of the sacristy are open, are the subject of a new book by a Spanish art historian who has spent 11 years trying to unpick the secrets and meanings of the stone buffet.

The arch, carved between 1533 and 1535, provides what Juan Clemente Rodríguez Estévez calls a “snapshot of a seminal moment”. Its carvings, he suggests, are chapters in the social, religious, economic and cultural history of Spain.

The Americas were a fresh and lucrative discovery, the end of the seven-century reconquista , which culminated in the expulsion of the Jews, was a mere four decades distant, and the Reformation was sweeping Europe. Contemporary theologians and mystics focused on the importance of the eucharist, and sought to portray communion as “a great feast to which everyone was invited”, said Rodríguez, who teaches at the University of Seville.

His book, The Universal Banquet: Art and Food in Renaissance Seville, examines how food was used to strengthen Catholic identity.

Pork features three times among the 68 plates, but olive oil – a staple of Andalucía since Roman times – is curiously absent. Rodríguez’s theory is that it may have been left out on the orders of Baltasar del Río, a bishop instrumental in the arch’s creation. Del Río was from a family of conversos – Jewish converts to Catholicism. Mindful of his roots, the bishop may have chosen to exclude oil because it was used by Jews who, like Muslims, did not fry their food in pork fat.

The bread could be a reference to Del Río’s decision to found a brotherhood to help feed Seville’s poor. “There was a terrible famine in 1521 and he ordered cheap wheat to be bought so that the poor would be provided with bread.”

The peppers, which Rodríguez had taken for strawberries until one of the botanists he consulted set him straight, are the only crop from the Americas. “There aren’t more foods from there because it was still early days,” he said. “At that time, corn was mainly used as animal feed, and the potato hadn’t arrived in Spain because the conquest of Peru took place in the 1530s, so the ships from Peru were only beginning to arrive.”

The traffic, however, was not all one way. Augustinian friars, who followed the Dominicans and the Franciscans to the Americas, built three churches in Mexico in the 1560s whose doorways were decorated with plates of food.

Rodríguez is keen to stress that he owes a huge debt to the botanists, zoologists and other experts he consulted. “I couldn’t have written the book if it wasn’t for the decades of work by researchers who have helped us understand food in a cultural context,” he said. “All I would have seen was a load of plates.”